Labels affixed to products for identification purposes are printed in various ways. One of the most common and inexpensive methods of printing labels employs a flexographic printer. A flexographic printing plate is manufactured having the opposite image of the label. The plate is attached to the drum of the flexographic printer. With each revolution of the drum, ink is applied to the plate and the plate then makes contact with the label material and imprints the label image thereon. When this type of printing process is employed, all of the label information, including product name, trademarks, brand name, tag lines, descriptions, ingredients, weight, volume, fanciful design elements, etc., must be printed simultaneously. If any of this information must be changed or modified, at least a portion of the flexographic printing plate must be remanufactured. If the label changes are substantial, a new printing plate must be manufactured.
Alternatively, labels can be printed using one of many types of electronic printers. These printers are typically connected to computers or programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and include laser printers, ink jet printers, thermal/thermal transfer printers, spray printers, dot matrix printers, and the like. The information to be printed upon each label is entered and stored within the computer or PLC which in turn sends the information to the printer. This method of printing labels is typically inefficient. More time is required to print each label. The more or fancier the information, the more time consuming the process. The quality of labels printed entirely by electronic printers is often inferior. While flexographic printers have the capability of custom die cutting label stock, labels printed electronically must be printed on pre-die cut label stock. Misalignment of the stock in the electronic printer can cause numerous problems.
Neither of the above label printing processes can easily print two-color labels.
The present invention combines flexographic label printing with electronic label printing in order to produce one or two-color labels having a variety of information elements including information that is used regularly on a group or type of label (permanent copy) and information that is changed from one label batch to the next (variable copy). It is an object of this invention to provide a label printing system meeting this criteria. It is a further object to provide such a system that is contained as one integral unit. It is further an object to provide such a system that is easy to use and produces high quality labels. These and other objects of the invention will become apparent in the following descriptions.